Blog post on AI-native hiring practices for Ops teams#16884
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Ok this is my first blog, so go easy. I still need to upload an image for this but wanted to get some feedback on this first, as I prob need to re-do some parts. Alternatively, we just stick this in the shredder immediately.
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Vale prose linter → found 5 errors, 21 warnings, 0 suggestions in your markdown Full report → Copy the linter results into an LLM to batch-fix issues. Linter being weird? Update the rules!
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ivanagas
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ivanagas
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I think the piece overall is looking good (content is good), mostly made some broad suggestions about framing.
I will do another line edit pass once you're ready.
| In Q2 2026, we finally caved and admitted what we knew for a while. That AI-native candidate are the preferred candidate when it comes to hiring our Ops & Finance roles. Whilst we’d been very pro AI-native candidates for a long time in both our technical & non-technical roles, we finally hit the point where it’s no longer a toss up between seniority & slope, it was all-in on the AI-pilled hiring plan. | ||
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| AI-native sounds lovely, and it also sounds like a buzzword, so this is meant to show you what we mean by AI-native and how I am implementing it into Ops & Finance. We’ll also cover the reality that it’s not perfect. |
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I think we should focus more on the AI-native vs experience bit here. Just start forcefully with that and we can give a lot of the context (like ops and finance) later.
Ops & Finance is the example we will use throughout, but the "AI-native vs experience" is the main bit.
| 3. Years of experience do still matter and often correlate to stronger candidates. | ||
| 4. Years of experience are now used as a tiebreaker between ai-native candidates rather than a moat | ||
| 5. The person still needs to actually be an [insert job] they can’t just be an ai junkie who fancies being an accounting manager | ||
| 6. This isn’t bullet-proof, there are still downsides |
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This isn't really a "why", it's more a "what"
Could we just roll some of the important points into the intro? We already include "Years of experience do still matter and often correlate to stronger candidates." and could add "Years of experience are now used as a tiebreaker between ai-native candidates rather than a moat" too it.
These two might be good to include (but the below section also covers them well)
- AI-native means a team member treat agents and LLMs as their default. This is where they cook.
- Every role we have in Ops & Finance now has to be using AI and automation in their daily workflows
I think "The person still needs to actually be an [insert job] they can’t just be an ai junkie who fancies being an accounting manager" could go below.
Also, we can probably just remove "this isn't bullet-proof" as we don't need to hedge without context.
| ## Where is this all heading? | ||
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| The practical result: PostHog's hiring plan for the next 2-3 years is smaller than it would have been a year ago. Not because we're growing slower. Because each ai-native hire is cracked enough that we need fewer of them. What we don't yet know is what people do with the time. The optimistic version is the 3 hours a day you save get reinvested — into building, into learning the fundamentals, into finally writing your own python. the pessimistic version is Parkinson's law eats it and we all just have more meetings. |
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This is more the "why hire AI-native", do we have any stats on how much more productive they are? Are we ahead of schedule on the roadmap or something?
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added a little bit of ops team composition size within the business
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
Removed unnecessary bullet points and clarified the definition of AI-native candidates in hiring practices.
Added insights on the characteristics and impact of AI-native hires on company operations and hiring plans.
Co-authored-by: Ian Vanagas <34755028+ivanagas@users.noreply.github.com>
The empty `featuredImage: >-` value caused a Gatsby schema type conflict (string vs object on Mdx.frontmatter.featuredImage), which dropped the field from the GraphQL schema and broke every query referencing it. Generated-By: PostHog Code Task-Id: 19649dfb-f56c-426c-8185-d42aed805dc6
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Made some edits so good to go on my end :)
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| ### 2. Talent partner | ||
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| A traditional talent partner is always on. They're at the coalface internally and externally, managing lots of people, having difficult conversations, and smiling through all of it. They work late doing calls to find the right person, chase feedback from hiring managers, and reply to rejected candidates at 11pm. They often burn out quickly. |
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I made some edits, the only one I didn't make is changing "coalface" which I don't fully understand what it means and most readers won't either
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ahh good catch! Very British.
Reworded the description of a traditional talent partner for clarity.
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Happy to not review this - I don't feel like I have an informed opinion on AI-native ops hiring, having not done any personally! |
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@ivanagas anything else I need to do before publishing? |
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nope, merge when ready :) |
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Ok this is my first blog, so go easy.
I still need to upload an image for this but wanted to get some feedback on this first, as I prob need to re-do some parts.
Alternatively, we just stick this in the shredder immediately.